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Launching in December, 2010 The Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938-1957 is the complete, fully text searchable facsimile archive of the Picture Post, the iconic newspaper published in Britain between 1938-1957 that defined the style of photojournalism in the 20th century. It is primarily intended as a resource for academic institutions.

As the latest addition to Gale Historical Newspaper Collections, the Picture Post provides students and researchers with online access to a remarkable visual record of the 1930s to 1950s – from the humorous and light-hearted snapshots of daily life in Britain to the serious and history-defining moments of domestic and international affairs.

Featuring the work of Berty Hardy, Kurt Hutton, John Chillingworth, Bill Brandt, Humphrey Spender, Thurston Hopkins and many more iconic photojournalists.

The online archive consists of the complete run of the paper – from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 and includes almost 50,000 pages – all newly digitised in full colour from originals from Getty Images’ Hulton Archive, holders of the Picture Post Photographic Collection.

For further information see www.gale.cengage.co.uk/picturepost

Geoffrey Crawley, one of Britain's best photographic editors and scientists, has died aged 83. Crawley was editor of the British Journal of Photography between 1967 and 1987 and worked there until 2000, when he joined Amateur Photographer as photo-science consultant. He wrote for the magazine until recently.

Crawley had a long career in photography and invented the developer Acutol which was sold by Paterson from 1963. He also investigated the Cottingley Fairies hoax and was, for the first time, able to conclusively show how the 1921 fairy photographs had been produced. Crawley was widely consulted within and outside the photographic industry for his expertise in photographic chemistry and science. His active involvement in photography and photographic publishing brought him into contact with many of the leading photographers and photographic personalities from the 1940s onwards.

Fuller obituaries have been published in Amateur Photographer and the British Journal of Photography click the links to read them.

8/11/10 update: there is a rather nice obituary of Geoffrey here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/europe/07crawley.html?_r=1

which sums up the Cottingley Fairies story ands his role in it rather well.

BBC Radio 4 included a feature on Crawley as part of its Last Word programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00vryrj/Last_Word_12_11_2010 the Crawley section begins at 22mins 58 secs and contributors include Colin Harding from the National Media Museum and Chris Dickie, a former editor of the BJP.

Michael Pritchard writes... I first met Crawley in the late 1990s when he decided to sell at Christie's the Cottingley fairy cameras, photographs and related material that he had acquired as part of his research into the story. An appeal was launched and the material was subsequently passed to the then National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. I visited him at his house in Westcliffe-on-Sea and spent an enjoyable morning listening to his stories about the BJP in the 1960s and the wider photographic world. I proposed that he be interviewed as part of the British Library's Oral History of British Photography but sadly the suggestion was not taken up  by the project. He was an impressive man with a great recall of people of events that have now passed into British photographic history.

See: Geoffrey Crawley, 'That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies' in British Journal of Photography Part One (24 December 1982, pp. 1374-1380); Part Two (31 December 1982, pp. 1406-1414); Part Three (7 January 1983, pp. 9-15); Part Four (21 January 1983, pp. 66-71); Part Five (28 January 1983, pp. 91-96); Part Six (4 February 1983, pp. 117-121; Part Seven (11 February 1983, pp. 142-145, 153, 159); Part Eight (18 February 1983, pp. 170-171); Part Nine (1 April 1983, pp. 332-338); Part Ten (8 April 1982, pp. 362-367)

Geoffrey Crawley, 'Cottingley Revisited' in British Journal of Photography, 24 May 1985, pp. 574-562.

Elinor Carucci‘s photographs have consistently explored the types and levels of intimacy, focusing on her own body, her parents, her husband, and more recently, her children. Often photographing in close-range, Carucci relies on bits and pieces, expressions and symbols to communicate joy, pain, and the sometimes-elegiac sentiments that accompany relationships.

Born 1971 in Jerusalem, Elinor Carucci graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography, and moved to New York in the same year. She was awarded the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. Carucci has had solo exhibitions at galleries including Edwynn Houk Gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, London. Her photographs are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Houston Museum of Fine Art, among others. She has published two monographs to date, Closer (Chronicle, 2002) and Diary of a Dancer (Steidl, 2005). Carucci is represented by James Hyman Gallery, London.

Tuesday, 16 November 2010

6.00pm, Research Forum South Room,

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Open to all, free admission

Contacts:

Alexandra Moschovi (alexandra.moschovi@courtauld.ac.uk)

Julian Stallabrass (julian.stallabrass@courtauld.ac.uk), or

Benedict Burbridge (benedict.burbridge@courtauld.ac.uk)

I am researching my great grandfather Henry Sutton who was an Australian inventor. In the 1890s Henry lived in London and was a member of The London Camera Club. Henry invented a halftone photographic process called Electro-Phototypy, He set up a Company called Sutton's Process Syndicate Ltd in 1891 which ran out of 4 Tokenhouse Buildings and the place of production was in Blackfriars Rd just around the corner from Fleet St. His process was used in two weekly newspapers and a number of book publishers used his process also.

Henry was also a photographer and exhibited many of his photographs at the time and won a Gold Medal for one of his stereoscopic photographs, a number of his photographs were published at the time and I have managed to find a few but I'm sure there are more. One of the private investors of Henry's process was the photographer Samuel Bourne, Henry also knew Captain Abney, Lord Rayleigh etc.

In 1892 he met Nikola Tesla, Tesla and Henry arranged with Rayleigh and Preece from the Telegraph office to use another invention of Henry's to transmit a photograph via the telegraph.

I am trying to find out more information about this transmission and anything in relation to the above information about Henry. I have more information if you think you might be able to help me or know anything please let me know.

Back in October 2009 BPH reported on the National Media Museum's revised signage project and subsequently reported on the positive reaction to it. The London-based designers behind the project, Carter Wong, have published their own short report on the signage project. Click here to read it: http://www.carterwongdesign.com/projects/national-media-museum.php

The Victorians were the harbingers of the modern age, their society driven by curiosity, a zeal for invention, and an enormous appetite for economic and imperial consumption. The boiler room of the era was stoked furiously, and its frequent combustions produced advances in everything from science and philosophy to industry and architecture.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Scotland was a nation transformed. Glasgow had exploded into the second city of the Empire, the majestic Forth Bridge was celebrated as a wonder of the modern world, and railways had opened the remote Highlands to new industries of leisure and tourism. But for every grand museum or gothic-revival country house, tenements and slums rose in their thousands – overcrowded living for the vast army of workers that sustained the great Victorian machine. Ambition and wealth saw social divisions become ever more acute, producing a society obsessed with class hierarchy.

Now, for the first time, RCAHMS is showcasing images from its National Collection in a remarkable illustration of this landmark era. From the pioneering work of photographers like John Forbes White, William Donaldson Clark, Thomas Annan and Harry Bedford Lemere, to never before seen excerpts from private family albums, Victorian Scotland is a window on the lives of the generation who changed the world.

Available to buy at £30 - just click on the Amazon link on the right to search for it!

Photo: A team of Victorian surveyors ready their instruments outside an unidentified building. c1890

team on their return from the South Pole. Hurley’s extraordinary icescapes were taken during Ernest Shackleton's Polar expedition on Endurance in 1914–17, which ended with the heroic sea journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia. Both collections of photographs were presented to King George V and are today part of the Royal Photograph Collection.

Details of the NZ exhibition can be found here, and the one in London here. You can also preview a selection of the exhibit highlights or buy a copy of the book here. Or perhaps try the Amazon link on the right.

Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road will present the first survey of Felice Beato's (British, born Italy, 1832-1909) long and varied photography career which covered a wide geographical area—from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. This exhibition will run concurrently with Photography from the New China. The official press release is as follows.

"In 2007, the Getty Museum acquired a substantial collection of more than 800 photographs by Beato, a partial gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography. This important acquisition is the impetus and foundation for this exhibition, which covers Beato's entire career from his war photography to his commercial studio work," said Judith Keller, senior curator of photographs.

The exhibition looks closely at the photographs Beato made during his peripatetic career that spanned four decades. Following in the wake of Britain's colonial empire, Beato was among the primary photographers to provide images of newly opened countries such as India, China, Japan, Korea, and Burma. A pioneer war photographer, Beato recorded several major conflicts, including the Crimean War in 1855-1856, the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny in 1858-1859, the Second Opium War in 1860, the Western punitive campaign to Shimonoseki, Japan, in 1864, and the American expedition to Korea in 1871. His photographs of battlefields, the first to show evidences of the dead, provided a new direction for war photography.

"Felice Beato was one of the first global photographers," explains Anne Lacoste, assistant curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. "No one before him was present with a camera in so many
different countries to chronicle conflicts or to record their foreign cultures ranging from the Crimea, to India, to China, to Japan, to Korea, to Sudan and finally Burma."

Beato's experience in the Crimea was a decisive point in his career. There he learned to make photographs in extreme and unpredictable conditions. He insinuated himself into the world of the officers' mess and assiduously cultivated his connections with those men. Such relationships would serve him well throughout his career, particularly in covering military campaigns in India, China, and Burma.

Eager to take advantage of Western interest in the conflict in India, Beato arrived in 1858 to record the rebellion's aftermath. Guided by military officers, he made images of the mutiny's main sites—Delhi,
Cawnpore, and Lucknow—that he sequenced and captioned to re-create the primary events. In some views, he added enemy corpses to increase the dramatic effect.

Under the extreme wartime conditions of the Second Opium War, where Beato accompanied the French and British troops, he made a series of photographs that documented the progress of the military campaign, including gruesome scenes taken immediately after the ravages of battle.

Known in Beato's time as the Hermit Kingdom, Korea was one of the last countries still closed to the outside world. Beato was hired to document an American punitive expedition to Korea to seek a treaty and negotiate trade relations. However, violence broke out and retaliatory actions were taken by the Americans. From his trip, Beato brought back 47 photographs, including numerous portraits of military crews and views of the fleet and battlefields. Among these views of the local scenery and portraits were the first known photographs of Korean natives.

Details of the exhibition can be found here. After premiering at the Getty this winter, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road, will be on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, Japan, in Spring 2012.

An archive of Brunel material consigned by a descendant of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel was sold at auction on 2 November 2010 (click to see the full sale) by Tooveys in Sussex. Included in the sale were several items of photographic interest, click to see the full descriptions:

• BRUNEL, Isambard Kingdom (1806-1859). - Robert HOWLETT and George DOWNES (photographers). A stereoscopic 'double' patent, titled on pink paper label verso '16. "The Leviathan" Steam Ship. Portrait of Mr. Brunel'. [London:] Photographic Institution, [n.d. but circa 1857?]. Overall card size 174 x 85mm. (images with arched top, each 75 x 73mm.). - And four other related images (stereocard views of the Great Eastern). Provenance: Lady Sophia Macnamara Hawes neé Brunel (1802-1878), sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (inscriptions verso). Sold for £17,000

• BRUNEL, Isambard Kingdom (1806-1859). - Unknown photographer. A shaped photographic portrait of Brunel. [N.p.: n.d. but circa 1857 or earlier]. Irregularly shaped and laid down on thin card. (Faded). Provenance: Lady Sophia Macnamara Hawes neé Brunel (1802-1878), sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Apparently a calotype, sold for £2200

• HAWES, Sir Benjamin, (1797-1862), and Lady Sophia Macnamara HAWES neé BRUNEL (1802-1878). An album of topographical, military and portrait photographs, apparently assembled by or for Sir Benjamin and Lady Sophia Hawes. [N.p.: n.d. but circa 1857-1868]. Large 4to (283 x 226mm.), 66 leaves mounted with an original pencilled watercolour portrait of Lady Hawes by her daughter, dated 1865; 96 mounted photographic portraits (most carte-de-visite format, including 16 of royalty, a number accompanied by clipped signatures); 59 British topographical photographic views; 5 topographical photographic views of Canton (one inscribed 'taken by Corporal Wotherspoon R.E. April 1850' but torn into image area); 35 photographs of cannons, military equipment and constructions (one with associated label 'Photographic Establishment of the War Department'). (The majority slightly faded.) Original green morocco gilt, g.e. (scuffed, lower joint split). Note: Sir Benjamin served as Minister of War during the Crimean War. Sold for £13,000

• DICKINS, Frederick Victor (1838-1915, ?compiler). - Unknown photographer. An album of mounted topographical photographs of Japan. [Japan: n.d. but circa 1870-1879.]. Folio (360 x 260mm.) 54 mounted photographs (most 210 x 283mm.); 35 mounted coloured scenes of Japanese life printed on cloth; 4 mounted Japanese botanical prints on paper, on 55 card leaves. Original green half-morocco (worn). Provenance: Thomas Dickins (Edgemoor House, Manchester, bookplate). Note: Frederick Victor Dickins, an orientalist of note and translator of Japanese literature, lived in Japan from 1871 to 1879. He appears to have annotated the album for Thomas Dickins. Sold for £4000

• RAILWAYS. Unknown photographer. A fine side view of 'The Puffing Billy'. [N.p.: n.d. but circa 1855-1862.] 1 photograph (200 x 278mm.) backed onto paper with early manuscript caption slip. (Somewhat faded). Note: 'The Puffing Billy is one of the two earliest surviving locomotives. Sold for £750

• PHOTOGRAPHS. A carte-de-visite album containing a good selection of photographs depicting 19th Century authors, scientists and others. [N.p.: n.d. but circa 1870-1890.] 4to (285 x 215mm.) 23 leaves with 140 carte-de-visite or cabinet photographs, a few with associated clipped signatures, subjects include C. Darwin, T. Huxley, L. Pasteur, T. Edison, H.W. Longfellow, N. Hawthorne, C. Dickens, E.A. Poe, Gen. R.E. Lee, Charles Peace, J.E. Millais. Original morocco (worn). Sold for £4000

• TALBOT, William Henry Fox (1800-1877). A mounted calotype from 'The Pencil of Nature', with manuscript title to mount 'Bust of Patroculus' [n.p.: n.d. but 1843]. Calotype (143 x 139mm.) With ruled ink border, on original thin card mount (303 x 240mm.), with number '17' below lower-right corner of the calotype, and title in ink at lower-right corner of the mount. (Print faded, light soiling to mount). Note: plate 17, showing Talbot's plaster cast of a Hellenistic marble, from his 'The Pencil of Nature'. Sold for £600

Monday 8th November will be a dark and creepy evening at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, as Professor Heard, the world’s finest Phantasmagoria Magic Lantern Projectionist, will be performing a show in the library.

There will be 2 performances, a family friendly show at 4.30 – 5pm, then at 7.30 – 9pm an evening event where things get a bit more sinister and spooky!

ALL WELCOME, the event is free, however booking is essential! call 0161 06 0555 to reserve yourself a free seat or email jrul.events@manchester.ac.uk at the John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester M3 3EH.

Until recently John Deakin has been missing from photographic history. He resisted his talent fiercely, treating success with mistrust and greeting failure with indifference. His career began with Vogue but, despite achieving recognition for the photographs he took there he never took it seriously and never expected it to make him a living. Deakin's bad behaviour was legendary and he remains the only staff photographer in the magazine's history to be hired and fired twice by the same admiring but exasperated editor.

Deakin yearned to be a painter like his friends Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun, Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews, whom in time he would photograph. In turn, Andrews and Freud both painted his likeness. Loved and loathed in equal measure, Deakin was a celebrated part of the artistic circle that convened in the pubs and clubs of Soho, London's bohemian quarter, the lure of which eventually led him away from regular employment.

Gods and Monsters is drawn largely from a portfolio commissioned by Vogue in 1951 and 1952 of twelve contemporary artists, shown here in its entirety for the first time, along with other portraits of painters and sculptors Deakin made for the magazine at various times throughout his brief career. Vogue has agreed to lend its vintage prints, which in their ragged state show the patina of age and handling that accrues to a magazine's raw material. Further, like so much of Deakin's oeuvre, they are lucky to have survived him. They were only re-discovered in Vogue's archives in the early 1990s.

Details of the exhibition can be found here.

Leicester, UK: The De Montfort University Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) draws together and integrates scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines and research on primary sources from the 19th through the 21st centuries of photographic history. It has strong strategic alliances with institutions such as the British Library, V&A, National Media Museum, Société française de photographie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, reflecting its standing as an internationally recognised centre of research excellence. Current Centre members include Dr Kelley Wilder, Senior Research Fellow and MA Photographic History and Practice Programme Leader; Roger Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Photographic History and internationally renowned specialist in mid-19th century photography; Professor Stephen Brown, Head of the Department of Imaging and Communication Design and Director of Knowledge Media Design at De Montfort University.

You will have a clear vision of the future of photographic history, that will enhance the profile and status of photographic history and conservation internationally. You will raise the international standing of DMU in the area of photographic history, by attracting research students and producing excellent research scholarship. In addition to being Research Professor, you will become the first Director of the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC), a rotating position to be held for up to five years. You will encourage the initiatives already begun at PHRC and bring your own vision to the Research Centre.

You should have a PhD (Equivalent qualifications accepted) or equivalent relevant experience in the field, extensive publication experience and have produced scholarship considered by peers to be ground breaking in the field. You should also have a track record of winning grant funding and have supervised students at MA and Phd levels.

Closing Date : 26 November 2010

Interview Date: w/c 3 January 2011

Application forms and further details are available from our website: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/jobs

Alternatively telephone 0116 250 6433 (24 hour answerphone). Or write to:

The Human Resources Team, De Montfort University,

The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH.

Salary to be set by the Vice Chancellor in accordance with the Senior Staff Pay and Grading Structure. Please Quote Reference : 6605